Description:
'In any Australian bookshop oriented to the general public, as in Britain and the USA, fantasy books for children and young adults have gained huge increase in shelf space over the past decade; enough fantasy books for these age groups have been published each year in Australia to begin to justify a division on the shelves between realist and fantasy (and, more recently, another division between fantasy and the paranormal) Australian fiction. Fantasy for these age groups ia a major selling category, and the categories for the Aurealis Awards (the premier Australian award for speculative fiction) have been progressively expanded, in the case of children's literature, to five. Fantasy for these age groups is thus a major sector of the Australian market. The ferocity of competition for substantial awards, both monetary and in terms of literary prizes, perhaps explains why some fantasy authors for children and young adults are in the forefront of Australian literary marketing in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Garth Nix being among the most successful in the field. (Authors introduction )
Description:
Anal jokes abound in Andy Griffiths' trilogy of novels for children, The Day My Bum Went Psycho (2001), Zombie Bums From Uranus (2003) and Bumageddon (2005). The titles of the second and third volumes give a fair idea of the quality and makeup of these jokes: they generally take the form either of double entendres (Uranus or "your anus", a joke likely to be lost on American readers because in the USA "anus" is a taboo word and Uranus is therefore mispronounced "urinous") or anal transmogrifications of common words (Bumageddon for Armageddon). Such jokes can be found on almost every page of the trilogy, sometimes more than once on a page. To date, Griffiths' Bum trilogy has received scant critical attention with the exception of Yvonne Hammer's 'Interrogating the Humanist Subject in Carnivalesque Quest Novels' (2006); but its extreme focus on matters anal in both wordplay and plot invites scrutiny from those theoretical perspectives that take an interest in the scatalogical. In this paper I shall be considering the trilogy's fondness for anal jokes and bums from three such perspectives, those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and Sigmund Freud.
Description:
The chronotope is suggested as going beyond the didactic to embrace the artistic and cultural in children's responses to their reading and writing. The essentially solipsistic concerns of young children and young adults in schools may be engaged using the suggestive possibilities of the chronotope as an organising feature of teaching reading and writing in a number of genres and production of text types, affording new ways of approaching reading and writing in classrooms. The chronotope opens up spaces for literary and pedagogical responses that takes teachers and students beyond the traditional and conventional referents of characterisation, plot, theme, setting, style, and so on. While this paper's focus is on literature designed for Australian children and young adults, the concepts may be applied more generally in relation to literature from within other cultures as well.
Description:
The chronotope is suggested as going beyond the didactic to embrace the artistic and cultural in children's responses to their reading and writing. The essentially solipsistic concerns of young children and young adults in schools may be engaged using the suggestive possibilities of the chronotope as an organising feature of teaching reading and writing in a number of genres and production of text types, affording new ways of approaching reading and writing in classrooms. The chronotope opens up spaces for literary and pedagogical responses that takes teachers and students beyond the traditional and conventional referents of characterisation, plot, theme, setting, style, and so on. While this paper's focus is on literature designed for Australian children and young adults, the concepts may be applied more generally in relation to literature from within other cultures as well.
Description:
As soon as fantasy writers make factual statements about the nature of their fictional worlds, limits come into play. If this is a world ruled by one omnipotent deity, it is going to be tricky to introduce the Greek gods later on; if magic works by a certain set of rules, it cannot work by conflicting rules without the need for justification; if ghosts exist, some explanation will be required when the narrator asserts that no-one comes back from the dead. This paper explores and evaluates ways in which three contemporary fantasy writers set up and dissolve such limits with regard to the after life. Each of these writers has produced an extended, multi-volume fantasy opus amply establishing rules and limits for its fictional world or worlds: Ursula Le Guin in her six-volume Earthsea series, Philip Pullman in his trilogy, His Dark Materials, and Garth Nix in his Old Kingdom series of novels (four volumes to date). Each of these writers sets up what I shall term a ‘first death’ and a ‘second death’; the second death is presented in their fictions as a final stage of being while the first death, although it may initially seem permanent, turns out to be transitional. Each of these fictions ultimately dissolves the limits that seem to have been set up in the first death, but their strategies of release are arguably not always as liberatory as claimed.